A misconception we encounter often is that “memory” is the only, or most important, “thing” that our brains do. And the only one we need to care for.

We have a variety of cognitive abilities, from attention to processing speed to problem-solving to emotional self-regulation to, yes, memory. (And more). Even memory is not one whole thing, but has different types and processes: working memory vs. long-term, auditory vs. visual, events vs. facts vs. skills.

I say this in the context of this article and video you may already have seen, where a young chimp displays amazing visual working memory capability, beating humans.

“This study shows that chimps can memorize at a glance the numerals presented on the screen, and that they can do so just as well – and even better – than humans can. Note that the superior performance came from a young chimp, and that the performance of older chimps on the same task was more similar to that of humans.”

Impressive, isn’t yet? Yet, a clear indication that memory is not all that matters. Please compare the “intelligence” (in any way you want to define it), the quality of thinking, displayed by those apes, with the one displayed in this recent interview with Bill Drayton at Good Magazine, founder of Ashoka and one of the parents of the social entrepreneurship movement. Quotes:

– “Ashoka (and all of us in the GOOD community) are serving the most profound historical transformation in the structure of society since the agricultural revolution–the shift from a world led by small elites to an “everyone a change-maker” global society.”

– “Social entrepreneurship is the field Ashoka has been building for 27 years that helps the world’s most promising new ideas and the social entrepreneurs behind them get started, succeed over their long life cycles, work and collaborate together through the local to global community we are building.”

Some important cognitive abilities are what neuropsychologists call Executive Functions, which reside in our frontal lobes (behind your forehead), the most recent part of our brains in evolutionary terms. Some examples: